Texas sell millions of records, but singer Sharleen Spiteri shuns fame. 'I won't even dip my toe into that pond,' she tells Tony Clayton-Lea
One of the most durable pop/rock bands of the past 20 years, Glasgow's Texas seem to have also become one of the most unobtrusive: the key members of the band - Sharleen Spiteri and Johnny McElhone - pop their heads over the parapet every few years, release a record that sells millions of copies, tour the world, and then retreat from view.
The perception of the band and their modus operandi is largely one of curiosity: how can they get away with such popularity when they don't appear to be selling their souls? How can someone as famous as Sharleen Spiteri be so grounded?
"I work very hard at keeping it low key," she says, feet curled behind up her on a sofa in a Dublin hotel. She has her shoes on, which makes you want to ask her would she do that kind of thing at home, except she's not at home - she's in a pricey gaff where rock stars can do pretty much what they want with their footwear. She's wearing black, and her hair falls in perfectly curved lines over a face that has launched more than a thousand daydreams.
"Fame is not something you can play with, and a lot of celebrities choose to play with it - they want it when they want it and they don't want it when they don't want it. It doesn't work that way, however. I understand and respect fame for what it is, but I won't go into the public arena with it - I won't even dip my toe into that pond. I'm not interested and I don't need it for my own ego."
Such modesty is rare in these times, when unabated ego appears to rule the roost. Spiteri recalls the early days of Texas - the late 1980s - when they once met U2 during that band's Rattle and Hum tour; the immense divide between self-importance and personable manners; how, as she remembers, "they were so famous yet so down to earth. I was incredibly impressed by their attitude, and I remember thinking that this is the way to go, this is what you're supposed to be like when you're famous. I'm forever grateful for that lesson in humility".
The odd shouting match notwithstanding, Spiteri has learnt from that lesson well. The good thing about Texas is that, while ambitious enough to want to make a different album each time they enter a recording studio, the band has never pretentiously over reached itself. The core band members know where they fit in, and while it's by no means a narrow or niche, it's nevertheless a defined space.
"Every album is a new direction, isn't it? Or it certainly should be. What's the point of making the same record over and over again? Some bands might do that, but it's a watered down version of the same thing, and eventually the water gets quite shallow and then you're gone. So it's all down to whether you want to take the chance of doing something different. Surely you want to be inspired and enjoy it, but if you're just doing the same thing over and over again, what's the point?
"Formula is a very different place from where Texas come from. It's like working in a sweet factory - you're just going to get sick of it. I don't mean me but the public, and you'd be a fool to presume you know what the public want and to think that there is a formula. There's a lot of music put together these days, but for song writers, for bands, for musicians - for people that get excited about plugging in their guitar and battering out a few songs - it's a completely different thing altogether."
There's a hard-headedness about Spiteri that's impossible to ignore. I ask her whether motherhood (she has a 14-month-old daughter) has inspired her to write songs about her child. With a shake of her head and those curved lines of hair it's a notion she summarily dismisses.
"I'm not into writing about my child in song, not at all. I can't stand it when people write about their kids. I find it so pretentious, so self-righteous, very boring and selfish, and if that's all you've got to write about then you might as well as pack it in right now." Spiteri is at pains to point out she's not by any means judging other parents who might wish to eulogise their offspring in song, "but I don't think I'm different from any other parent, so I don't see why I should blather on about it. Besides, anyone who doesn't have kids won't be interested in listening. To me, writing songs and making music is about escapism, that's what music is for, and to write a song that's about me, my life and my family would be boring. I'm bored listening to me, anyway."
Hard-hearted as well as being as tough as her sofa-scratching boots? Well not completly - here comes a love bomb: "Being a mother and parent is something very special, and my daughter is just about the most amazing thing ever. I simply don't want to share these feelings with anybody, that's all."
Now living a life of relative rock-star seclusion in a small celebrity-ridden enclave in London, Spiteri has been through the paparazzi phase and come out the other side relatively unscathed. She's right when she says her life isn't interesting or exciting enough to appeal to the tabloids on a long-term basis. When she was pregnant, however, she experienced the glow of Heat and the greetings of Hello.
"That was unbelievable - I'd gone through all those years of success, magazine covers and fame and had never been under the microscope of the paparazzi camera. Then I got pregnant, and certain newspapers and magazines became obsessed with the idea of well-known people being ordinary and normal - which is weird, because you can see me up in Sainsbury's most weeks. But there was a bunch of well-known women pregnant at pretty much the same time, and we all knew each other. So the press coverage was all a bit of a number, I think. But me? I'd been around for years and they didn't go near me; then I was photographed pregnant and I thought great - the first paparazzi photograph to be taken of me is when I'm a fat bitch. Fantastic!"
Still quite intrigued by the feeling she gets when she finishes a record, for Spiteri having a hunger in the belly, being up for a challenge, is a good thing. That and honesty, which she says is something Texas as a unit has, for better or worse, lived by since its inception.
The begrudgers? "Over 20 million people have copies of our records, so really - who cares about them?"
Be Careful What You Wish For by Texas is on Mercury